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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The key to breaking my dependency was not detox, or fears about the impact on my brain, but making the substance a bit rubbish.
So thank you, Elon Musk, for stepping in when my willpower failed, and finally forcing me to lose interest in X. I’ve flirted with other peddlers, hoping they might offer replacement highs — Bluesky and Mastodon — but they lack serendipity and humour.
My dysfunctional relationship with Twitter started 15 years ago after attending a TweetUp gathering of users in a warehouse in Shoreditch, east London, where I met people with stickers displaying their handles. To a newbie it seemed baffling and banal. But then I gained followers (not many) and it started to make some kind of sense.
In the pandemic, isolated people around the world took to Twitter, for news and company. In its letter to shareholders, the social media site said its active users increased 27 per cent in 2020. It became a news source, live documenting Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger land a near-crashing plane on the Hudson river in 2009, the spread of the Arab Spring in 2011, the growth of #MeToo.
But in a fractured media landscape, ironically, the delight was in forming connections. Whatever your niche, there was someone out there to cohabit it. Recently, I found fellow fans of Tore, the Swedish Netflix series. There are communities of art and poetry lovers, as well as nuns, teachers and medics. It could make sports events, or even the daily government Covid briefings, a communal experience.
I enjoyed its absurdist humour and inventiveness, such as a 2015 viral 148-tweet thread which started, “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” It recounted a story which veered into sex trafficking and violence. The subsequent film adaptation, Zola, proved that some stories were better suited to social media.
It was useful for work to find experts and sources. The writer Marian Keyes told me the platform made her aware of changes in language, new slang, and different perspectives. Mainly I lurked and wittered. It suited my personality: more whispered asides than centre-stage monologues.
And yet there was also the misogyny, harassment, the trolls, disinformation and the rage. I detested its tendency for drama and breathlessness. Derek Thompson recently wrote in The Atlantic about the “arousing negativity contained in much viral media: indignation, anger, shame”. It thrives on the “principles that counsellors implore us to reject” such as “to avoid catastrophic thinking, to cool the fire of anger, to reconstruct their feelings and thoughts to be more patient with themselves”. Similarly, a former minister complained to me recently how the government had become caught up in the Twitter treadmill, unable to step back and reflect.
It was shaping my brain too. I would sometimes become paralysed by anticipatory thoughts. The author Mark Haddon struck a chord: “Part of my mind would be constantly alert for, and quietly fashioning, tweetable material, highlighting the more succinctly packageable aspects of what was in front of me and simplifying the more complex aspects.”
Occasionally, I would detox to focus on a project, but inevitably I’d return — and the compulsion made me hate it more. It wasn’t until Musk took over that the newly named X lost its appeal. The cuts to X’s content moderation staff allowed more hate to spew forth. The platform no longer works as a news stream. I refuse to pay for a service that I have given so much content to over the years.
I’ll still lurk and post occasionally, hoping in vain, to capture my earlier highs. Like the advertisers, I should just accept it’s time to give up — and that, finally, is something to thank Musk for, I guess.